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Honestly, not that I've seen, no. Maybe an error will linger for a few decades or more before being specifically condemned by some Bishop. And that's after some wicked prelate begins disseminating it to undermine a dogma. But, in this case, it has been present for centuries alongside Catholic teaching with virtually no specific condemnation from the proper authority, namely, Rome. And it also doesn't seek to deny a dogma outright, as other heresies do, forcing an authoritative definition; but merely expounds upon one (baptism) under the realm of theological speculation. One cannot say Trent defined baptism for this purpose. As Trent was purely there as the official "reform" of the Church in answer to the Protestants.

Which is why I have to question whether it even is an error in its Thomistic/Alphonsian form. That's three doctors teaching the same thing over the course of 400 years? With no authoritative correction until some parish priest points it out in the 1940s-50s? Not even a murmur of other learned theologians on the matter from the 13th to 20th centuries? That's absolutely unheard of.

No, this is either something birthed from the neo-Scholastic movement, or, perhaps we, Fr. Feeney and the Dimonds are wrong and those teaching the possibility are right.

It is evident, both from Bellarmine and Billuart, that no one can be saved unless he belongs to the visible communion of the Church, either actually or virtually, and also that the salvation of catechumens can be asserted only because they do so belong; that is, because they are in the vestibule, for the purpose of entering, – have already entered in their will and proximate disposition. St. Thomas teaches with regard to these, in case they have faith working by love, that all they lack is the reception of the visible sacrament in re; but if they are prevented by death from receiving it in re before the Church is ready to administer it, that God supplies the defect, accepts the will for the deed, and reputes them to be baptized. If the defect is supplied, and God reputes them to be baptized, they are so in effect, have in effect received the visible sacrament, are truly members of the external communion of the Church, and therefore are saved in it, not out of it (Summa, 3, Q.68, a.2, corp. ad 2. Et ad 3.)… …Bellarmine, Billuart, Perrone, etc., in speaking of persons as belonging to the soul and not to the body, mean, it is evident, not persons who in no sense belong to the body, but simply those who, though they in effect belong to it, do not belong to it in the full and strict sense of the word, because they have not received the visible sacrament in re. All they teach is simply that persons may be saved who have not received the visible sacrament in re; but they by no means teach that persons can be saved without having received the visible sacrament at all. There is no difference between their view and ours, for we have never contended for anything more than this; only we think, that, in these times especially, when the tendency is to depreciate the external, it is more proper to speak of them simply as belonging to the soul, for the fact the most important to be insisted on is, not that it is impossible to be saved without receiving the visible sacrament in re, but that it is impossible to be saved without receiving the visible sacrament at least in voto et proxima dispositione.




Brownson, Orestes. “The Great Question.” Brownson’s Quarterly Review. Oct. 1847. Found in: Brownson, Henry F. The Works of Orestes A. Brownson: Collected and Arranged. Vol.V. (pp.562-563). Detroit: Thorndike Nourse, Publisher, 1884.

The good thing is that Vatican I specifically condemned any such interpretations of definitions.

Sess. 3, ch. 4. 14. Hence, too,that meaning of the sacred dogmas is ever to be maintained which has once been declared by holy mother church, and there must never be any abandonment of this sense under the pretext or in the name of a more profound understanding.